Myla Goldberg has 5 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 7 narrators, with an average listener rating of 5★ across 1 ratings. The most-rated is Bee Season.
Bee Season
Summary
Eliza Naumann, a seemingly unremarkable 9-year-old, expects never to fit into her gifted family: her autodidact father, Saul, absorbed in his study of Jewish mysticism; her brother, Aaron, the vessel of his father's spiritual ambitions; and her brilliant but distant lawyer-mom, Miriam. But when Eliza sweeps her school and district spelling bees in quick succession, Saul takes it as a sign that she is destined for greatness. In this altered reality, Saul inducts her into his hallowed study and lavishes upon her the attention previously reserved for Aaron, who in his displacement embarks upon a lone quest for spiritual fulfillment. When Miriam's secret life triggers a familial explosion, it is Eliza who must order the chaos. Myla Goldberg's keen eye for detail brings Eliza's journey to three-dimensional life. As she rises from classroom obscurity to the blinding lights and outsized expectations of the National Bee, Eliza's small pains and large joys are finely wrought and deeply felt. Not merely a coming-of-age story, Goldberg's first novel delicately examines the unraveling fabric of one family. The outcome of this tale is as startling and unconventional as her prose, which wields its metaphors sharply and rings with maturity. The work of a lyrical and gifted storyteller, Bee Season marks the arrival of an extraordinarily talented new writer.
©2000 Myla Goldberg (P)2001 Recorded Books, LLC
Wickett's Remedy
Summary
In a multidimensional, intricately wrought narrative, Myla Goldberg leads us back to Boston in the early part of the twentieth century and into two completely captivating worlds. One is that of Lydia, an Irish-American shopgirl with bigger aspirations than your average young woman from South Boston. She seems to be well on her way to the life she has dreamed of when she marries Henry Wickett, a shy medical student and the scion of a Boston Brahmin family. However, soon after their wedding, Henry abruptly quits medical school to create a mail-order patent medicine called Wickett's Remedy, and just as Lydia begins to adjust to her husband's new vocation, the infamous Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918 begins its deadly sweep across the world, irrevocably changing their lives.In a world turned almost unrecognizable by swift and sudden tragedy, Lydia finds herself working as a nurse in an experimental ward dedicated to understanding the raging epidemic, through the use of human subjects.Meanwhile, a parallel narrative explores the world of QD Soda, the illegitimate offspring of Wickett's Remedy, stolen away by Henry Wickett's one-time business partner Quentin Driscoll, who goes about transforming it into a soft drink empire.Throughout the novel we hear from a chorus of other voices who offer a running commentary from the book's margins, playing off the ongoing narrative and cleverly illuminating the slippery interplay of perception and memory. Based on years of research and evoking actual events, Wickett's Remedy perfectly captures the texture of the times and brings a colorful cast of characters vividly to life, none more so than Lydia, a heroine as winning and appealing as Eliza, the beloved spelling champion of Bee Season.With dazzling dexterity, Goldberg has fashioned a novel that beautifully combines the intimate and the epic. Wickett's Remedy announces her arrival as a major novelist.
©2005 Myla Goldberg (P)2005 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc.
Time's Magpie
Summary
From the critically acclaimed best-selling author of Bee Season comes a travelogue through the magical and historic city of Prague, a city of vast beauty and wonderfully intimate detail. In Time's Magpie, Myla Goldberg uses her eye for the wonder of tiny objects and everyday things to put us in touch with the essence of this haunting and fantastical place. Goldberg takes us through the city's historic streets, some eerily transformed by the devastating flood of 2002; to Lunapark, home to bumper cars, go-carts, and a discomfiting array of Technicolor confections; and through Strahov Monastery, where the cabinets of curiosity display everything from butterfly specimens to a supposedly real jabberwocky. We attend an anti-war protest in Old Town square and watch the skateboarders do tricks on a ramped marble pedestal that once held a statue of Lenin.
©2004 Myla Goldberg (P)2004 Books on Tape
The False Friend
Summary
From the bestselling author of Bee Season comes an astonishingly complex psychological drama with a simple setup: two eleven-year-old girls, best friends and fierce rivals, go into the woods. Only one comes out.... Leaders of a mercurial clique of girls, Celia and Djuna reigned mercilessly over their three followers. One after?noon, they decided to walk home along a forbidden road. Djuna disappeared, and for twenty years Celia blocked out how it happened. The lie Celia told to conceal her misdeed became the accepted truth: everyone assumed Djuna had been abducted, though neither she nor her abductor was ever found. Celia’s unconscious avoidance of this has meant that while she and her longtime boyfriend, Huck, are professionally successful, they’ve been unable to move forward, their relationship falling into a rut that threatens to bury them both. Celia returns to her hometown to confess the truth, but her family and childhood friends don’t believe her. Huck wants to be supportive, but his love can’t blind him to all that contra?dicts Celia’s version of the past. Celia’s desperate search to understand what happened to Djuna has powerful consequences. A deeply resonant and emotionally charged story, The False Friend explores the adults that children become - leading us to question the truths that we accept or reject, as well as the lies to which we succumb.
©2010 Myla Goldberg (P)2010 Random House Audio
Feast Your Eyes
Summary
One of NPR’s Best Books of 2019 A 2020 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence finalist A 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award finalist A 2020 Chautauqua Prize finalist “A daringly inventive parable of female creativity and motherhood” (O, The Oprah Magazine) from Myla Goldberg, the award-winning, New York Times best-selling author of Bee Season, a compelling and wholly original story about a female photographer grappling with ambition and motherhood, a balancing act familiar to women of every generation. Feast Your Eyes, framed as the catalog notes from a photography show at the Museum of Modern Art, tells the life story of Lillian Preston: “America’s Worst Mother, America’s Bravest Mother, America’s Worst Photographer, or America’s Greatest Photographer, depending on who was talking.” After discovering photography as a teenager through her high school’s photo club, Lillian rejects her parents’ expectations of college and marriage and moves to New York City in 1955. When a small gallery exhibits partially nude photographs of Lillian and her daughter, Samantha, Lillian is arrested, thrust into the national spotlight, and targeted with an obscenity charge. Mother and daughter’s sudden notoriety changes the course of both of their lives and especially Lillian’s career as she continues a lifelong quest for artistic legitimacy and recognition. “A searching consideration of the way that the identities and perceptions of a female artist shift over time” (The New Yorker), Feast Your Eyes shares Samantha’s memories, interviews with Lillian’s friends and lovers, and excerpts from Lillian’s journals and letters - a collage of stories and impressions, together amounting to an astounding portrait of a mother and an artist dedicated, above all, to a vision of beauty, truth, and authenticity. Myla Goldberg has gifted us with “a mother-daughter story, an art-monster story, and an exciting structural gambit” (Lit Hub) - and, in the end, “a universal and profound story of love and loss” (New York Newsday).
©2019 Myla Goldberg (P)2019 Simon & Schuster